problems booting mx-17 and gparted live flash drives

Okay, as I was saying in another thread, I have two newer notebooks that don't seemed to want to boot my flash drives that have MX-17 or GParted Live on them. The other distros that I have on flash drives boot fine, but when I try to boot with either the MX-17 flash drive or the GParted Live flash drive, I get taken to the boot screen of the installed system rather than to the ones I'm trying to boot from the flash drives.

Looking at one of the computers now, HP 15-ba015wm.

From GParted on an installed system, I go to View > Device Information and I see "Partition table: gpt".

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

Hm. I've been following the same steps to prepare a flash drive for every iso I try. I clear the flash drive with:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=100

Then, from GParted, I create a new partition table (msdos) and a new partition (FAT32). Then I copy the iso to the flash drive.

I have my Kubuntu 18.04 flash drive plugged in right now. GParted shows the flash drive's partition table as msdos. Yet this flash drive boots both UEFI notebooks, as do all of my other flash drives, except for the ones with MX-17 and GParted Live isos copied to them. So perhaps you can understand my confusion here.

So, for MX-17 and for GParted Live, I'd have to make the flash drive's partition table gpt, even though I haven't had to do that for Kubuntu and the other distros??? I mean, that's cool and everything, maybe things are different with MX and GParted Live.

OK, regardless of why the other distros boot those notebooks even with msdos partitions on the flash drives, I'll go ahead and download the GParted Live iso again, then make a gpt partition table on the flash drive and copy the iso the flash drive, and that should take care of it.

No luck so far. I downloaded gparted-live-0.32.0-1-amd64.iso. Checked the md5sum. Cleared my flash drive as noted above. From Debian Stretch, I opened GParted, created a new partition table (gpt) and a new FAT32 partition. Checked the partition table again with GParted to make sure it was still gpt. Then I copied the iso to the flash drive.

After that, I again used GParted in Debian Stretch to check the flash drive's partition table, but now it says it's a msdos partition table!!! I have no idea why that happened. So, the flash drive won't boot either UEFI notebook, and it boots the older notebooks with no problem.

I did all of this twice, same results.

Lol, this is all very interesting but I'm gonna have to let it go for now, got other things to attend to. securitybreach, thanks very much for trying to help me out.

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984

sunrat, I didn't have a problem writing MX-17.1 to the flash drive. I wrote the iso to the flash drive only a few weeks ago (Sept 19, according to my notes) with the following command:

$ sudo dd if=MX-17.1_August_x64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4m; sync

That flash drive boots my older notebooks with no problem; it's only the two UEFI notebooks that it fails on.

I've successfully used quite a few different flash drives to boot those two UEFI notebooks, with several different distros. The only ones so far that won't boot either UEFI notebook are MX-17 and GParted Live 0.32.0-1. I may try the lastest MX-17 snapshot if/when I get around to it. One notebook is currently running Arch and the other one is currently home to Debian Stretch, and I won't be replacing either of those installations any time soon.

In the past, I've actually booted both notebooks into live sessions of of MX-15 and earlier versions of GParted Live (GParted Live 0.29.0-1-amd64 is one example -- I used that one to partition the hard drive on one of those notebooks!).

FWIW, I was a Mepis user, back in the day -- I could always count on that distro. And I've always been able to count on MX and GParted Live, until now.

I use a MX-17 usb live in a legacy laptop and also on my UEFI desktop with no problems. The desktop has "secure boot and fast boot" disabled. if that helps to muddy the waters at all.

Ha-ha! Yeah, if there's one thing I've learned over the past few days, it's that when it comes to UEFI/Secure Boot and all that, the waters can definitely be muddy!

Thanks for all the help, folks! Y'all are great and I really think that more people should come here for help. I'll keeping putting the good word out about these forums, for sure!

securitybreach, on 08 October 2018 - 11:49 AM, said:

Well unless your flash drives are GPT partition tabled, they will not be able to boot because of Legacy Support <Disabled>

I do have several flash drives that have msdos partition tables (according to GParted) that for some reason will boot my UEFI notebooks, even though (as I'm understanding things) they shouldn't, not with legacy support disabled.

I also have one (which I've used to install Kubuntu 18.04) that GParted shows as having a mac partition table! I didn't create that partition table! Check this out, this is from parted:

I've been digging through my notes, looking back on what I've done in the past with these two notebooks, and also looking stuff up online. I'm learning a lot but also finding lots of confusing info. Kinda fun, in a way.

A bit more data. I have MX-17.1 installed on an old HP laptop from 2012. I downloaded the latest MX 17 snapshot ISO and burned it using MX-17's excellent Live USB maker. This thumb drive ISO booted on the old laptop, and also on my Lenovo Flex2-15D laptop which has UEFI enabled and also runs Windows 10. The MX-17 USB maker does set up the drive to use UEFI.

It's just that my installed systems (Debian Stretch on one notebook and Arch on the other) are booting fine, and I don't want to mess around with the Setup Utility on either of these two notebooks just to try to boot the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives, especially since I don't really need either distro at this point, and especially after reading what was written at the page linked above.

It's becoming quite clear that what works on one computer won't necessarily work on another computer, even if they seem to be quite similar. Also, various distros are doing things differently. And there's a lot of incorrect info out there on the web.

One thing, though, kinda unrelated, regarding something I mentioned earlier, about the flash drive with Kubuntu 18.04 on it: Why does parted show that one as having a mac partition table? I certainly didn't specify "mac" when I created that partition table! Does anyone here know anything about this? I haven't had any problems booting either of these two notebooks with that flash drive, and earlier I installed Kubuntu 18.04 on one of the notebooks, using that flash drive (later, I wiped Kubuntu and put that distro on an older notebook, for reasons that have nothing to do with this discussion).

One further data point. The USB drive with MX-17 I created boots fine on an Acer desktop which is an all-Intel system. The thumbdrive is a 16GB Verbatim and shows up as (UEFI) Verbatim in the boot order. I did not use any sort of partition editor prior to letting the MX-17 Live USB creator do its thing. Just went with defaults. The other two laptops I tried with the thumbdrive were AMD APU machines so the source of technology isn't an issue.

AND one last final machine. I booted the thumbdrive successfully on my main Linux desktop - AMD A8-5600 APU with R7 360 video card. This machine has a Gigabyte BIOS that supports both Legacy and UEFI. Posting from it now.
So my bottom line is that the MX-17 Live USB creator has done a good job and I can get the drive to boot on a variety of laptops and desktops. This probably doesn't do much to help saturnian though.

So for MX I could try the MX-17 Live USB Creator, on an older notebook, from a live session. I'm guessing that this would be a good way to go. My approach has been to use dd to clear the flash drive, then GParted to create the partition table and to do the partitioning, then dd to write the iso to the flash drive, all from an installed system. It's been a very reliable approach, except in this case, I can't get the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives to boot these two newer notebooks.

I'm assuming that I would not be able to use MX-17 Live USB Creator to put GParted Live on a flash drive. I prefer to stay with the command line approach as much as possible. The GParted Live documentation (https://gparted.org/liveusb.php) mentions four approaches -- Tuxboot, "Manual" (using a zip file and makeboot.sh), Unetbootin, and "Manual - Overwrite" (using an iso file and dd). I'm gonna pass on trying Tuxboot and Unetbootin (I've gone with Unetbootin in the past, with mixed results).

I have a flash drive that has KNOPPIX 7.7.1 on it. I did that one about two years ago, using flash-knoppix from a live session, which I was running from DVD. That flash drive boots both newer notebooks beautifully!

Success with GParted Live 0.32.0-1, using the zip file approach as shown at the GParted Live site! Booted both newer notebooks.

I followed the steps there and found that it was not necessary to run makeboot.sh at the end, because that's "for making a bootable disk with MBR partition table" and I'd created a gpt partition table.

Before trying with the zip file, I made another attempt with dd and the iso file. What keeps happening is that each time I write the iso to the flash drive with dd, the partition table changes from gpt to msdos (!!!). So then the flash drive won't boot my newer notebooks. When I used the unzip command with the zip file, the partition table remained gpt, and the flash drive worked for me.

OK, so maybe I'll try a different approach for MX-17 later, but for now I'm happy about being able to boot GParted Live on both of these notebooks!

I don't think the MX-17 live USB creator is all that much different from a CLI approach. You see the commands being executed in a window, that's all. It does have a few tricks to get the stick formatted correctly for UEFI. I don't see why a live version on USB could not format another USB stick as long as you can plug in two thumbdrives and know which one to format.
Personally, I never bother with trying to set up partitions on a USB drive. I just get a USB installer that works for me. Linux Mint has a good one, and if I try it with Windows there is Rufus or LI-Li USB Creator.

I don't see why a live version on USB could not format another USB stick as long as you can plug in two thumbdrives and know which one to format.

Yeah, that should work. Not sure if/when I'll get around to trying it for MX-17; I'm finding that I'm losing interest in that distro, sorta like how I lost interest in Linux Mint.

I've used Unetbootin in the past, but since it didn't always work, I kinda got turned off by GUI approaches. And there are definitely some advantages to going the CLI route. Also, I tend to prefer approaches that work with lots of different distros rather relying upon any one distro's special tools. But that's just me, different strokes for different folks.

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain." -George Orwell, 1984